2012-2013 Different Stages Theatre Season, Austin

Different Stages 2013-2014 Season

Arsenic and Old Lace

by Joseph Kesselring

November 22- December 14, The Vortex 2307 Manor Rd.

The year is 1941. The location is a small house next to a cemetery in Brooklyn. In this house live two kind, thoughtful, sweet old ladies, Martha and Abby Brewster who have cultivated an interesting pastime. For the Brewster family, insanity runs in the blood. These two sweet old aunts take it upon themselves to poison lonely old men with nothing to live for, as an act of charity. While their nephew Mortimer, a newlywed, tries to negotiate his way around the shenanigans of the house, while keeping his bride from fleeing. Shady brother Jonathan returns from a world adventure involving nefarious means of changing his appearance to allude capture, while bugle-blowing brother Teddy, who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt, is charged with burial duties ... in the cellar. One of the most popular plays in the history of American theater, this classic comedy by Joseph Kesselring is murder most funny.

The Language Archive
by Julia Cho

January 10-February 1, City Theater 3823 Airport, Suite D.

George is a linguist who can't find the words to keep his marriage from falling apart. His lonely assistant is so desperately in love with him that she tries to learn Esperanto, an ancient language thought to be lost forever, to tell him so. Meanwhile, George attempts to record the last two speakers of Esperanto, an aging couple, only to learn that they plan to spend the rest of their lives arguing ... in English. Will their language perish forever out of spite? Language and love are the twin themes of this loopy excursion into the difficulty of finding words for what lies in our hearts. A Susan Smith Blackburn Prize winner, this lyrical, quirky comedy offers a gorgeous look at the power of words and the private languages that love inspires.

Child's Play

by Robert Marasco

April 4- April 26, City Theater, 3823 Airport, Suite D.

The play centers on the rivalry between two faculty members at St. Charles, an exclusive RomanCatholic boarding school for boys. Joe Dobbs is an easy-going, well-liked English teacher, while Latin and Greek instructor Jerome Malley is feared and hated by his students for his strict disciplinary methods. Malley is caring for his dying mother, and his stress is exacerbated by a series of threatening phone calls and written notes he receives. He's certain Dobbs is the source, but his caustic personality prevents him from winning any sympathy or support. Into the fray comes Paul Reese, a former student who has been hired to teach PE, and he soon finds his loyalty torn between the friendly Dobbs and Malley, as he becomes increasingly aware of the latter's personal torments. Compounding his situation is the realization that the unbridled violence practiced by the students may be the result of demonic possession.

Pygmalion

by George Bernard Shaw

June 27 - July 19, The Vortex, 2307 Manor Rd.

In this classic tale, one of George Bernard Shaw's most beloved comedies of manners, wiley Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle finds herself in the right place at the right time, just as arrogant phonetician Henry Higgins makes a friendly wager that he can transform her guttersnipe speech and manners to pass her off as the epitome of English society at an ambassador's ball by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes is impeccable speech. The story was later adapted into the popular musical My Fair Lady. Shaw's original tale is not one of romance, but of beauty, class and power. As comedic and satirical today as it was then, Pygmalion will have you wondering what truly makes a person beautiful.

HEARTBREAK HOUSE by George Bernard Shaw, Southwestern University, April 25 - 28, 2013

(Southwestern University, 1001 E. University Blvd, Georgetown)


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Tickets Still Available! Apr. 25 – 28, 2013 8pm | Thurs., Fri. & Sat 3pm | Sun. Jones Theater By George Bernard Shaw Directed by Ev Lunning, Jr. Purchase Tickets A comedy about love, money and the end of the world. Heartbreak House is a soap opera of the 1900’s, where no one is who they seem and everyone gets their heart broken. During a weekend party at the eccentric Captain Shotover’s estate, Ellie causes a commotion with her decision to marry for money rather than love. As the Captain’s daughter Hesione protests, a lively debate about money, morality, idealism, and realism ensues among Hesione’s playboy husband, snobbish sister, and Ellie’s fiance, a wealthy industrialist. “brilliant comedy”–The New York Times Southwestern University, Sarofim School of Fine Arts 1001 E. University Avenue, Georgetown, TX 78626 | (512) 863-1504 (Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

HEARTBREAK HOUSE by George Bernard Shaw, Southwestern University, April 25 - 28, 2013

(Southwestern University, 1001 E. University Blvd, Georgetown)

presents

Heartbreak House
by George Bernard Shaw
April 25-28, 2013
8pm | Thursday, Friday &Saturday
3pm | Sunday
Jesse H. and Mary Gibbs Jones Theater

A soap opera of the 1900’s, where no one is who they seem and everyone gets their heart broken. During a weekend party at the eccentric Captain Shotover’s estate, Ellie causes a commotion with her decision to marry for money rather than love. As the Captain’s daughter Hesione protests, a lively debate about money, morality, idealism, and realism ensues among Hesione’s playboy husband, snobbish sister, and Ellie’s fiancée, a wealthy industrialist.

“brilliant comedy”–The New York Times

(Click to go to the AustinLiveTheatre front page)

Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, Austin Shakespeare at Rollins Theatre, Long Center, February 17 - March 6

Austin Shakespeare's staging of Shaw's Man and Superman at the Rollins Theatre has the pleasures of a long agreeable evening with toffee and cigars. No game of whist or bridge, for the contest here is between Man and Woman, or, to wax a bit more Shavian, between Man the Romantic and Intellectual on one hand and Woman the Life Force on the other.

Man doesn't stand a chance, of course.

You may well ponder -- where's the Superman? Shaw's play took the stage in 1903, less than ten years after the first translation into English of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra. That book presented the notion of the Übermensch, the human being who transcends conventional morality and the deceptive controls imposed by tradition and society. Treating the concept in this play, GBS disdained the awkward term "Beyond-Man" used in the first translation and coined the term "Superman." With his characteristic cheerful, waspish verbosity Shaw thoroughly explored this relatively new notion and used it as a club to wallop the conventions of English bourgeois society.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Don Juan in Hell by George Bernard Shaw, staged reading by Austin Shakespeare, Rollins Theatre, February 27

Received directly:

-- presents --

a staged reading of

Don Juan in Hell

by George Bernard Shaw

one night only: Sunday, February 27 at 7:30 p.m.

Rollins Theatre of The Long Center for the Performing Arts

Tickets available at thelongcenter.frontgatesolutions.com (512) 474-5664

or nowplayingaustin.com/DonJuaninHell (512-474-8497)

All tickets $15

Don Juan in Hell is a staged reading of Bernard Shaw's witty "Parliament in Hell" on the progress -- or lack thereof -- of humankind. Harvey Guion appears as the suave Devil, Shelby Davenport as the rambunctious Don Juan, Babs George as the fabulously quizzical Doña Ana and Ev Lunning, Jr. as the comic commendatore father of Don Juan. The audience is invited to join the fun in a post performance discussion.

Auditions for Austin Shakespeare's 2010-2011 Season

Found on-line at www.AustinActors.net:

Auditions for Austin Shakespeare for the season
Sat. Oct. 10, 2010 1 pm- 4 pm
Creative Alliance studio, 701 Tillery St.
Including Actors Equity contracts under SPT 1

2 men needed for a new stage adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Anthem in a NEW adaptation by Jeff Britting,
Performances at the Long Center: Thursday, Jan. 19 - Sunday, Jan. 23
Rehearsals begin Sun. Jan. 2
Directed by Ann Ciccolella

4 women; 7 men George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman
Performances at the Long Center: Thursday, Feb 17 - Sunday, March 6
Rehearsals begin Sun. Jan 23
Directed by Ann Ciccolella

2 women/10 men Shakespeare's Love’s Labour’s Lost
Performances at the Hillside Theatre in Zilker Park : Thursday, April 29 - Sunday, May 22
Rehearsals begin Sun. April 3
Directed by Robert Faires

TO SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT TIME: auditions@austinshakespeare.org

NOTE: Austin Shakespeare warmly encourages actors of all ethnic/racial backgrounds to audition.

Auditioners are asked to prepare a 1- 2 min speech from any classic or Shakespeare play, including Love’s Labour’s Lost or Man and Superman or Anthem. The piece may be memorized or read, but actors should be thoroughly familiar with the text. All roles are open. For more info on plot and cast breakdown see www.austinshakespeare.org

Contact: Austin Shakespeare auditions@austinshakespeare.org
Website: www.austinshakespeare.org

Auditions for Austin Shakespeare's 2010-2011 Season

Found on-line at www.AustinActors.net:

Auditions for Austin Shakespeare for the season
Sat. Oct. 10, 2010 1 pm- 4 pm
Creative Alliance studio, 701 Tillery St.
Including Actors Equity contracts under SPT 1

2 men needed for a new stage adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Anthem in a NEW adaptation by Jeff Britting,
Performances at the Long Center: Thursday, Jan. 19 - Sunday, Jan. 23
Rehearsals begin Sun. Jan. 2
Directed by Ann Ciccolella

4 women; 7 men George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman
Performances at the Long Center: Thursday, Feb 17 - Sunday, March 6
Rehearsals begin Sun. Jan 23
Directed by Ann Ciccolella

2 women/10 men Shakespeare's Love’s Labour’s Lost
Performances at the Hillside Theatre in Zilker Park : Thursday, April 29 - Sunday, May 22
Rehearsals begin Sun. April 3
Directed by Robert Faires

TO SCHEDULE AN APPOINTMENT TIME: auditions@austinshakespeare.org

NOTE: Austin Shakespeare warmly encourages actors of all ethnic/racial backgrounds to audition.

Auditioners are asked to prepare a 1- 2 min speech from any classic or Shakespeare play, including Love’s Labour’s Lost or Man and Superman or Anthem. The piece may be memorized or read, but actors should be thoroughly familiar with the text. All roles are open. For more info on plot and cast breakdown see www.austinshakespeare.org

Contact: Austin Shakespeare auditions@austinshakespeare.org
Website: www.austinshakespeare.org

Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw, Austin Playhouse, January 22 - February 21

Is it only coincidence that Austin theatre is staging a rolling centenary celebration of George Bernard Shaw? Not of his birth or death -- we'd have to wait another forty or so years for either of those, since the man lived well into his 90's --but of his plays exploring matrimony.

In late 2008 Different Stages gave us a twinkling production of Shaw's 1908 comedy Getting Married and now Austin Playhouse is offering Misalliance, first staged in 1910. Despite their talky amusements, in the canon of Shaw's 63 full-length dramas they are relatively unknown. You can browse the length of the shelves at Half-Price Books or consult the catalog at the Austin Public Library, and neither will appear.

So we have all the more reason to thank Austin stages for blowing the dust off GBS's mischievous social commentary. Getting Married looked at the dilemmas and disadvantages for the Edwardian chattering classes of the marriage contract; Misalliance pushes the boundries a bit further, as the rascally Fabian looks at the delusions of romantic love, the practicalities of extramarital liaisons, advocating a degree of female sexual liberation that must have left those proper Edwardians agog.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Images: Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw, Austin Playhouse, January 22 - February 21

Click for ALT review, February 3





Images by Christopher Loveless, received directly from Austin Playhouse,
for

Misalliance

by George Bernard Shaw
January 22 - February 21
Austin Playhouse

"The action unfolds in the garden room of John Tarleton’s Surrey estate. Tarleton is an underwear magnate and one of the newly wealthy merchant class. As the play opens, Tarleton’s daughter Hypatia is engaged to Bentley Summerhays, the intellectual son of Lord Summerhays, who once asked Hypatia to marry him. Tarleton’s son Johnny runs the family business, while his father indulges his own wild ideas and establishes free libraries around England.

"The domestic tranquility is interrupted by a plane crash in the backyard, delighting Hypatia, who has always longed for “adventure to drop out of the sky.” The plane carries a dashing young aviator who catches Hypatia’s eye [pictured: Lara Toner and Jason Newman], as well as Lina Szczepanowska, a Polish acrobat whose family tradition demands that she risk her life at least once a day. Lina catches the eye of almost every man. Adding to the mix is another unexpected guest, a gun-wielding clerk who is bent on revenge for Tarleton’s careless treatment of his mother. During the course of the play no fewer than eight romantic proposals are revealed, but which ones will last and which will prove to be misalliances?"

See additional images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Upcoming: Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw, Austin Playhouse, January 22 - February 21

Click for ALT review, February 3


Received directly:

Austin Playhouse presents

Misalliance

by George Bernard Shaw
January 22 - February 21
Thursday - Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 5 p.m.
NEW: matinee added for Saturday, February 20, 2 p.m.
Prices: $26 Thursdays & Fridays, $28 Saturdays & Sundays
$35 Opening Night, January 22
All student tickets are half-price
Tickets/Information: (512) 476-0084
Austin Playhouse, 3601 S. Congress, Bldg. C

Austin Playhouse proudly presents Shaw’s delightful comedy. Misalliance is a fast-paced, witty comedy that highlights the great characters, sparkling dialogue, and energetic humor for which Shaw is justly renowned. A whirlwind of characters from different social classes and professions including an underwear magnate, an ambassador, a Polish acrobat, and a socialist clerk, careen and carom off each other during the course of one afternoon at an English country estate.

Misalliance was written in 1909 during England’s brief Edwardian period. The Edwardian era was smashed right between the expansive Victorian period and the modern age that followed the Great War. This clash of old and new is central to the play as parents clash with children, capitalism clashes with socialism, and modern romance and gender equality clashes with traditional courtship and gender roles.

The violence of Shaw’s argument against stifling English propriety is given physical life in a large number of onstage acts of destruction including fistfights, gunplay, broken crockery, and a plane crash that all threaten to disrupt the genteel atmosphere.

Misalliance presented a shocking array of critiques of English society (many of which are still relevant and highly amusing today) and broke with the traditional popular parlor comedies. Its initial run was cut short due to the death of King Edward in 1910. It wasn’t revived again until the 1930’s. Today, Shaw’s whirlwind debate by characters is renowned as one of his most enduring and delightful plays.

Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com. . . .

Getting Married by George Bernard Shaw, Different Stages at the Vortex, November 14 - December 6

George Bernard Shaw wrote Getting Married exactly a century ago.

To my delight, I discovered that the New York Times makes available a copy of Catherine Welch’s 3800-word review of May 24, 1908, a full page of the paper, including sketches of GBS and two actors.

I haven’t read it yet, because with some difficulty I impose on myself the discipline of writing my own review before consulting others.

But I couldn’t avoid absorbing Mrs. Welch’s subtitles:
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW ON "GETTING MARRIED"; In His Singularly Unconventional Comedy He Tries Various Substitutes for Matrimony, but Finds No Good One. Incidentally He Thinks That Children Are a Kind of Wild Beast and That Old Maids Would Make Excellent Mothers.

There is a lot more to Shaw’s play than that, both in the printed version and in the lively interpretation being delivered by Different Stages at the Vortex.

Shaw was a man of ideas, a Fabian socialist from Ireland who delighted in goading the British upper classes. He was amazingly prolific (63 plays, 250,000 private letters, 5 novels) and prolix (he prefaced the printed text of Getting Married with a 30-page essay on matrimony, skewering conventional morality and asserting that the institution more resembled slavery than an access to "happiness"). Incidentally, he lived to the age of 94, dying in 1950 from complications of a fall out of a tree, and he is the only individual to have won both the Nobel prize and an Oscar (for the script of the first filmed version of "Pygmalion").

The simple interior of the Vortex, with the audience arrayed along two sides of a square playing space, gives us a generic interior. There’s a table and chairs in the middle, a fireplace upstage and exits upstage left and right. This could be anywhere – though a clumsy portrait of an ancestor hints at England.

The locale and atmosphere are established instead by the actors and their costumes. The women are all beautifully dressed; among the men, only the general could have used a bit more attention, with additional braid and a better quality of scarlet jacket.

GBS takes aim at the institution of matrimony by giving us mannered family chatter amongst the three Northbridge brothers, who are a general, a bishop, and a man about town, with their significant others and with the garrulous caterer/tradesman Mr. Collins. The characters are gathering for the wedding of the bishop’s youngest daughter Edith.

General Boxer Bridgenorth proposes for the tenth time in 20 years to Lesbia Grantham, his very much unmarried sister-in-law. Brother Reginald (Craig Kanne, left) is revealed to be obtaining a divorce from his perky young wife Leo (Lindsey Reeves, right), gallantly making way for her to pursue St. John Hotchkiss, a talkative, snobbish young ex-military man. Abruptly, today's scheduled wedding ceremony stalls because both Edith and prospective groom Cecil Sykes have become alarmed by tracts warning them of the legal pitfalls of matrimony.

Authoritatively bustling about is the matter-of-fact caterer Collins, reminiscent of Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady. Collins (Zac Crofford, having a good time), recounts cheerful stories about his sister-in-law the mayoress, Mrs. George – an impulsive libertine with a heart of gold, enduring love for her patient husband, and a gift of Delphic utterance.

Shaw delights in putting all sorts of contrarian observations into the mouths of his characters. For example, Reg’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Leo scandalizes the men when she declares that she would quite like to have several husbands: for example, Reg, St. John, some other young man with whom to be "quite wicked," and a saint, but just once a year. Sputtering, they call in their brother Alfred the bishop. Alfred listens patiently to her, including her complaint that Reg’s conversation had gotten boring. His rejoinder:

THE BISHOP. You see, my dear, you’ll exhaust St. John's conversation, too, in a week or so. A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor. In the end you have to be content with his common humanity; and when you come down to that, you find out about men what a great English poet of my acquaintance used to say about women: that they all taste alike. Marry whom you please: at the end of a month he'll be Reginald over again. It wasn’t worth changing: indeed it wasn’t.

LEO. Then it's a mistake to get married.

THE BISHOP. It is, my dear; but it's a much bigger mistake not to
get married.

As for the problem of the reluctant bridal pair, the bishop brings in the severely celibate church administrator and solicitor Father Anthony to help draw up a marriage contract. Suggestions criss-cross, debate and polemic fly apace, and the moral, legal, sentimental and religious grounds for the institution are thoroughly and wittily ventilated. Finally, at a loss, the bishop follows the counsel of caterer Collins and calls in the libertine Mayoress with the heart of gold to help explore the matter.

In this play of ideas the repartee is sharp and comic. But the piece is not only talk. Shaw includes some clever plot twists, including a come-uppance for the snob St. John, a truth-telling trance for the Mayoress, and the resolution of the dilemma of the young couple.

Lampooning of sexual mores of the very early 20th century is fun, particularly when one remembers the later liberties of the Bloomsbury set in London and of the roaring twenties in the United States. But the debate doesn’t target our own day very precisely – given today’s 50% termination rate for marriages, in the United States at least, and the long established variety of possibilities of escape from stifled, abusive or barren relationships.

Sex doesn’t have much to do with the discussions of Getting Married. It is hardly mentioned., Leo’s proposed polyandry is a search after diverting conversation. And despite Miss Lesbia Grantham’s first name, she professes no strong affections for other women – rather, she objects to the messiness, intrusion and tobacco smell of men in general. She appears to be, by preference, an abstainer from all carnal relations. (The Victorian attitude toward lesbianism is indicated by their commonplace interpretation that the Greek lesbian poet Sappho was, in fact, the governess of a girls’ school.)

Under Norman Blumensaadt's assured direction the cast has a fine time with Shaw’s zingers. My favorite was Emily Erington as Mrs. George, who appears, finally, as the voice of reasonable unreason, but only in the last act. Her small-boned vivacity, toughness and openness could seduce any reasonable man.






The Mayoress is nicely matched in a battle with Tyler Jones as the well-spoken, whimsical snob (but not cad) St. John Hotchkiss. I kept expecting that sporty mustache to fall off his upper lip, but it defied us and rode triumphantly through his ups and downs.

Craig Kanne as brother Reginald has a decisiveness, exuberance and comic timing very much like those of American actor/writer Wallace Shawn, whom he somewhat resembles. And he has a fine way of flapping the tail of his morning coat to emphasize his pique.

Alfred Bridgenorth, the bishop, could have been the slip-knot at the center of the matrimonial dilemma, and GBS certainly meant the gently doubting bishop to carry his humanitarian message. Randall Lorenz captures the genteel nature of the cleric, but in an atmosphere of assertive, cadenced talk by others, his relatively quiet delivery is overshadowed and loses some of its comedy. He comes across as simply too nice a guy. As his foil Father Anthony, Steven Fay is agreeably grumpy, bristle-browed and believable.

The pace is lively, but the director chose to follow the example of Shaw's 1908 production by inserting two brief intermissions in a text that Shaw wrote as an uninterrupted action. This allowed spectators access to the comfortable, well-stocked Vortex café, but it ran an already lengthy play to an elapsed playing time of three hours.

During the closing scenes I noted a shifting and possible impatience among some of the spectators. Perhaps, I thought, the piece was too long? (Who was I to say? Recalling Hamlet’s exasperated reply to Polonius: "It shall to the barber’s, with your beard. Prithee say on: He's for a jig, or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps.")

The next day I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg and read it with pleasure – and discovered that in fact, Shaw wraps up his plot with fine flourishes by page 77, when St. John Hotchkiss jovially refers to the impulsive Leo as "She Who Must Be Obeyed" (a tag used in our own day by John Mortimer’s comic character Rumpole of the Old Bailey, in reference to his wife).

But GBS couldn’t let go of the polemic – from that point forward he holds St. John and the Mayoress on stage for another five long pages with the severely celibate Father Anthony, on the pretext that because of her high office she must wait for a sufficient crowd to gather offstage. They further debate the meaning and usefulness of matrimony with the annoyed and dismissive priest/solicitor, The exchange yields not very much entertainment, even though it is full of pithy observations (a bit like that 30-page preface that Shaw printed with the play).

As a director, I probably would not have the audacity to cut the text of the redoubtable George Bernard Shaw. But as a spectator, I wish that GBS had done so, himself!

Michael Barnes' review in the Austin Statesman's on-line entertainment site Austin 360, November 24

Elizabeth Cobbe's review in the Austin Chronicle of November 28